After a transformative year as a fractional CFO working with early-stage startups, I faced a critical question: how do I scale my impact without losing the personal touch that makes my work valuable?
The answer led me to launch Northbeam - a brand that embodies the values, solutions and impact I want to deliver as a fractional CFO.
With Northbeam, I can now more effectively leverage new technologies, develop reliable playbooks and tap my network to provide value beyond my individual reach.
What Founders Need
Founders are naturally vision-driven. They're constantly painting pictures of what their company could become, but what's frequently missing is the headspace needed to chart the practical path from vision to reality.
Founders face an ever-growing list of great ideas, operational bottlenecks and existential threats. They need help focusing on what matters, creating a strategic plan, implementing it effectively, tracking its performance and optimising it further to improve results.
Many founders need the strategic guidance and financial execution that a CFO can offer, but they can't always afford it — or don't always need it — on a full-time basis. And they definitely do not want to pay expensive day rates for more routine, administrative tasks.
What founders want is CFO-level thinking applied to the right moments, with seamless execution filling the gaps and strong accountability over the whole process.
The Northbeam Approach
Launching Northbeam is not about scaling me as an individual—it’s about scaling the value I can deliver whilst maintaining a constant focus on relationships, accountability and cost-effectiveness that has been key to my partnerships with founders.
The Northbeam approach means that the right level of expertise is applied to each task whilst ensuring continuity and accountability throughout the entire process.
I remain the constant thread through every client relationship, every strategic decision, every piece of work. But by partnering with talented associates, leveraging technology and using reliable playbooks, I can focus my energy where it creates the most value: strategic guidance that helps founders navigate from bold vision to measurable results.
What Makes Northbeam Different
We are entrepreneurial by nature and creative by design.
The best CFOs have a founder’s mindset. They score highly on personal accountability and maintain a bias for action. They're comfortable with uncertainty and skilled at making decisions with incomplete information. As a two-time founder myself, I've structured Northbeam to embody this entrepreneurial mindset. We don't just report on what's happened; we actively help shape what happens next.
Numbers always tell a story, whether you want them to or not. The question is whether you're actively crafting that narrative or letting it craft itself. Northbeam helps founders take control of their financial narrative, using numbers to illustrate business challenges and financial opportunities with clarity, not manipulation.
How We Work
Our client engagements typically follow a consistent pattern that ensures both strategic thinking and reliable execution:
First, strategic foundation: I personally work with founders to establish a financial framework that supports a specific strategic goal, such as fundraising, profitability and growth. This framework helps us to better focus on the challenges we want to solve and the opportunities we want to pursue.
Second, systematic implementation: we handle the detailed work of building models, creating reports and maintaining ongoing financial processes—always within the strategic framework we've established together.
Finally, continuous optimisation: as CFO, I remain actively involved in interpreting results, identifying trends and suggesting strategic adjustments. The goal isn't just to measure performance but to use those measurements to drive better decisions.
This approach ensures senior strategic thinking is applied where it matters most and execution doesn't compromise on quality or impact.
The Bigger Picture
By making strategic financial guidance more accessible and cost-effective, we're helping more companies build sustainable growth foundations from day one. Finance should bring clarity, not complexity.
Northbeam puts strategy at the heart of financial planning, serving as our clients' North Star—helping them set their course and stay true to it through all the challenges they'll face.
The launch of Northbeam isn't just about evolution—it's about helping more founders successfully navigate from vision to reality. And that's a mission worth scaling.
